Case Study: Cystic Fibrosis

The Problem

A top 10 pharmaceutical company approached Sanguine with a cystic fibrosis (CF) study involving an interesting caveat regarding inclusion criteria based on recent international travel. The extremely low prevalenc::e of CF (approximately 70,000 patients worldwide, 30,000 in the US) made recruiting difficult, but the inclusion criteria for the healthy control subjects requiring recent travel to southeast Asia further complicated recruitment.

The Solution

Given the very specific inclusion and exclusion criteria of both the disease condition and the healthy controls, Sanguine developed a recruiting strategy employing several different avenues of donor contact. Sanguine partnered with a CF non-profit organization and created targeted social media and online advertising campaigns.

The 20 CF subjects and 10 matched controls were recruited in just 2 weeks; meanwhile the recruitment campaign was so successful it resulted in more than 60 qualified subjects being identified. Samples were collected via in-home appointments for all 30 subjects by Sanguine's mobile phlebotomy network, and all samples were processed by Sanguine's lab and frozen for delivery to the research lab without any complications.